An unapologetic guided tour of the mathematical life
A Round Table discussion Saturday October 21, 2:30 PM, at the Helix Center For those of you who will be in New York next weekend: Next Saturday at 2:30 PM I will be participating in a round table discussion with Barry Mazur, Nathalie Sinclair, Alma Steingart, and Jared Weinstein, on the theme The Permanence and [ ]
This message, which arrived in my Inbox today, should be of interest to all colleagues who are concerned about the future of scientific publishing, including but not limited to those who signed the Cost of Knowledge statement over 10 years ago. More information can be found at the PLOS Union website. We’re reaching out to [ ]
A new post on Silicon Reckoner asks whether the Singularity may have come and gone while attention was focused elsewhere.
In 2018 Harvard held a week-long celebration for Barry Mazur s 80th birthday. In keeping with Mazur s wide-ranging interests, and with the title — Mathematics Is a Long Conversation — the middle day was devoted to panel discussions on topics accessible to the general public. That day s program concluded with a public lecture by Manjul Bhargava [ ]
A place for reactions to and questions about siliconreckoner.substack.com. …beyond my interest in how current trends in mechanization of mathematics force me to sharpen my own understanding of what makes mathematics valuable as a human practice (as in this close reading of a magnificent lecture by Dick Gross), I am deeply interested in mechanization of [ ]
And what does this have to do with mechanization? …nothing evokes as much hostility among intellectuals as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science. (Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist) Last October 24 I unexpectedly received the following message from [ ]
Any change in technology leads almost inevitably to an improvement in the welfare of some and a deterioration in that of others. To be sure, it is possible to think of changes in production technology that are Pareto superior, but in practice such occurrences are extremely rare. Unless all individuals accept the “verdict” of the [ ]
For mathematical formalists, a proof is a sequence of valid formulas in a symbolic language, each obtained from the previous one (more likely the conjunction of several) by a legal transformation (rule of deduction), or the statement of an axiom. A theorem is then any valid formula that appears as the final statement in a [ ]
Mathematics is unpredictable. That s what makes it exciting. New things happen. William Thurston, May 14, 2007 It’s a gloomy, rainy, almost wintry day in Paris, which I don’t always love when it drizzles, and I’m starting to write the next entry in this newsletter, trying to figure out what, if anything, Christian Szegedy had in [ ]
Notes of a Columbia course with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and special guest Kevin Buzzard Summary Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors [ ]